Playtime for Team Sri Lanka!
I start this post with an apology for the fact this blog’s only just reaching you now, several weeks after our third briefing. Life has been pretty hectic for the whole of Team Sri Lanka recently. Both Jade and Lizzy have bought and moved houses; Lizzie has had archery competitions and I have been doing lots of fundraising with other members of my Senior Section and job hunting. Sarah has signed a new work contract that takes her up until we go on project and Jenny is selling loads of our lovely badges!
So, travelling back to the middle of June, Team Sri Lanka descended on Bedford to be the first official guests in Jades shiny new home. The trip down gave us some practice for the unpredictability of Sri Lankan transport, Sarah and Jade were the only two to manage to avoid any complications (and then that was partly due to Jade already being there!). Lizzy S and I had planned to meet on our train to Leicester, but this initially failed when I missed my train at Sheffield (This was right after I had posted on Facebook that as of yet I had had no travel issues). This sorted itself out though when Lizzy’s train was late into Leicester, so we managed the last leg of the journey together. Jenny meanwhile was having fun with luggage. The week before briefing, Jenny had been in Germany with work, and whilst Jenny had made it back to England, unfortunately her suitcase had not. Poor Lizzie by far had the worst journey down. What was initially a 4 hour or so journey turned into an 11 hour trek, what with train delays and Lizzie missing her stop! Poor Ben (Jade’s fiancé) was a part of this as well, making 4 attempts to pick Lizzie up from Milton Keynes, at one point driving around in circles as we tried to work out where Lizzie was and the best way for her to join us! Eventually, however, at the small hours of Saturday morning, we all made it and GOLD Sri Lanka 2015 was reunited for third briefing!
The weekend was an incredibly productive one with us going through the session plans we had come up with, creating some more; sorting out a bank account; planning our onward travel; reviewing our kit list and risk assessment; looking what we would like to take with us on project in terms of gifts and how we would like to commemorate the fact this is the last year of this GOLD project. All in two days! As well as a lot of serious and important things, we also made sure a few less serious items were covered. Lizzie and Jade practiced some of their songs, introducing some formerly unknown variations to us, we caught up with how everyone was doing, laughed an awful lot (to tears at more than one point!) and definitely made sure to check out the playground on Jade’s estate. They had some cool stuff on there that we hadn’t seen before, and we of course had to check out the zip wire! There was swings and slides, beams to work along, some weird see-saw and we also had a mini work out on the gym equipment they had. There was also some weird wheel thing that we tried to take our picture on, that definitely required balance and team work to achieve!
Third briefing was the first time we had come together as a team without all of the other Goldies. It was a great chance to get to know each other even more and plan what we are going to do whilst we are on project. As I write this Team Malawi and Cambodia are both on project with Team Rwanda getting ready to go in the next week.
And as we prepare for our fourth briefing, we wish all the best of luck to the summer projects and hope they have an amazing time with their sister guides!
Rachel and Team Sri Lanka x
